Judy Schmidt @geckzilla@mastodon.social

The reason it was off a degree was because I ended up using a version that wasn't corrected for geometric distortion, and I don't do that often, so ... I did it wrong. It should be a lot better now, though. Now I need to figure out how to do two comparative color versions.

Got this better aligned. I had it off by a degree or so. Here's a blink animation! Best to click the website link: http://geckzilla.com/astro/R_Aqr_WFC3_UVIS_F502N_2013_2017_blink.gif

Looking at it again this morning, it does look like there's this massive cast shadow in the northeastern cone in the overlaid/2017 image. Would probably make a lot more sense and look really cool if only we had a few more images per year.

Alright, I give up for real now. I looked on ADS, arXiv, and SIMBAD. I probably still missed it.

Wait, ok, I'm bad at searching for papers, too. Let me try harder.

Welp, I'm officially frustrated by this. I can't find any papers that explain these observations yet. Fair enough, it's only been a year. Either these are light beams sweeping the nebula, the nebula is moving fast (2.5% of c?), or I'm significantly wrong in my understanding.

I keep double-checking to make sure I have it right, because the whole nebula seems to rotate slightly, and a few sections change in a major way. Usually this means it's the illumination that's changing, not the structure of the nebula itself.

This is R Aqr with data from the same instrument, same F502N filter, rotated north up. One is from 2013, and the other is from 2017. I'm astonished, really. It's very hard to align them.

I'd love to tweet about the difference in seconds between these three, but I'm not sure about it. The shortest exposure seems to be just a few minutes, the middle image is 4 subexposures totaling under 2 hours, and the third seems to be a single exposure over three hours long.

After all this time I still can't figure out how to get exposure time information for subexposures unless they're in the HLA. There's a lot of stuff not in the HLA. You'd think FITS headers would contain such info, but I can't seem to find it.

Thought some new observations were rolling into my notifications inbox, but it turned out to be some from one year ago of R Aqr. Made me feel sad even though this is probably a really neat dataset. Well, let's download some data...

Isn't it strange... how, in space, there seems to be so little space

Seems the description could use a little help with converting newlines to html breaks... it's all mashed together.

One thing I noticed is that image quality is low at first; after you zoom in a bit and then zoom out, the quality is better. It should also work for mobile users.

Hooray, here is a web-shareable version of the M33 PHAT mosaic! A new website I was made aware of this morning seems to be good for sharing large images. Check it out. It also allows the downloading of the original size.
https://geckzilla.prodibi.com/a/y8vmwyjj507rvx?st=UH8TzbU%2FYnADMJaDqqn5U1l048uDsSqAx4iPh0I5rks%3D

I MESSED UP and am deleting this dropbox file. Photoshop didn't have a warning me you know it scaled down my image when I did a quick export. I've run into this problem before, but I forgot all about it. Gonna post a new link to a new and potentially way better thing.

Hubble is kind of my place of refuge from this mad world, and I would very, very much appreciate if the physics of fate and the Universe would be so kind as to allow it to continue working longer.

I feel vaguely nauseous and light headed at the mere thought of one of HST's gyros being broken, and the backup not working. One of those things I just don't think about and am not prepared for.

There are still three more available filter sets to work with, although they aren't the prettiest ones. The ~1μm near-infrared imagery is 39% of the resolution and therefore blurrier. The other near-uv filter is even shallower than the first one.

Here is a link to an updated full size version of the work-in-progress with three colors so far: F814W, F475W, F336W

File info: 22585x28915 pixels, 8-bit RGB, 167 MB

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rzsuik2oh38h17t/M33_mosaic_F814W_F475W_F336W.png?dl=0